Thoreau wrote the lines in 1862.
"The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild, and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. . . ."
Maybe he understood at a visceral, emotional level the power of this statement, but it's doubtful Thoreau could have foreseen the anthem his statement would become 150 years later. In the current age we understand there is science behind these words. We understand that air, land and water are interconnected aspects of wild, holistic natural systems. We understand that a rich assemblage of animal and plant species creates an optimum mix of ecosystem serivces, and these services support a quality of life that all living things require. We understand that wild places are literal factories producing goods and services supporting the fabric of life. Every time we humans appropriate a portion of the Wild for our own purposes we diminish the productivity of the landscape as a whole. We transform the landscape into cities or simple monoculture forests & farms. We degrade the landscape with our machines, our buildings and civilization's cast off byproducts. We acquire, convert, diminish and discard pieces of wild nature ... at a rate and a scale that today threatens the ability of natural systems to support life at all in the very near future.
We refer to this dramatic transformation of the planet's surface as the human appropriation of net primary productivity, or HANPP.
Primary productivity is the creation by plants of organic compounds (like leaves, stems, bark and roots), mostly through the process of photosynthesis. Primary production forms the base of the food chain. Net primary production accounts for losses tied to cellular respiration in plants, or the metabolic processes that convert biochemical energy into plant tissue leading to waste products, including oxygen, that are released back into the environment.
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| Composite image showing the global distribution of photosynthesis, including both oceanic phytoplankton and terrestrial vegetation |
HANPP was first proposed by Stanford's Peter Vitousek in 1986. His article in the journal BioScience, "Human Appropriation of the Products of Photosynthesis", observed that nearly 40% of land based net primary productivity is used directly, co-opted, or foregone because of human activities. Vitousek writes:
"Homo sapiens is only one of perhaps 5-30 million animal species on Earth, yet it controls a disproportionate share of the planet's resources. ...With current patterns of exploitation, distribution, and consumption, a substantially larger human population -- half again its present size or more -- could not be supported without co-opting well over half of terrestiral NPP. Demographic projections based on today's human population structures and growth rates point to at least that large an increase within a few decades and a considerable expansion beyond that. Observers who believe that limits to growth are so distant as to be of no consequence for today's decision makers appear unaware of these biological realities."
Vitousek's original argument was based on the presumption that there was simply a limitation of available land to support human settlement and consumption of natural resources. Twenty five years ago his work would not have taken into consideration an additional reality of increasing HANPP -- that appropriation of natural capital for human purposes diminishes the capacity of ecosystem services necessary to support ecological productivity in the first place. When we increase HANPP, it is at the expense of WNPP (wild net primary productivity). WNPP is the source of rich eco-services that are the foundation of the ecosystem factory.
Imagine that we are operating a factory that consumes an ever-increasing quantity of raw materials to produce an ever-decreasing quantity of poorly made goods. Or imagine we are driving a car that is growing in size as it moves down the highway with ever-increasing speed, consuming gasoline contained in an ever-decreasing sized fuel tank. Pure folly. But this is what we do when we blindly sacrifice WNPP for HANPP.
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| Geography of annual NPP resources required by the human population. Upper map illustrates NPP required to mitigate CO2 emissions to the environment. Lower map illustrates appropriation for NPP on land by infrastructure or human activity (agriculture, forest monoculture, etc.) |
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| How hard are we pushing the earth? Humans are using an increasing amount of the Earth's total land plant production for food, fiber, building and packaging materials and biofuels. |
What are the solutions? Stop the continued loss of WNPP. Build back lost WNPP as quickly as possible. Confront and reverse self-destructive human behavior by slowing rates of population growth, reducing or transforming demands on natural capital, and by restoring humanity's respect for the natural world and all its living inhabitants. We are mutually dependent, every leaf, feather, fin and follicle, every corner and every stone.
